contemplate the way you speak, the way you dress, the way you react when someone rudely shoves past you in a crowded room. do you bristle with indignation? brush it off with nonchalance? glare daggers in their direction? now, ask yourself—was this reaction a conscious decision, or was it programmed into you long before you had the awareness to resist it?
we like to believe we are the architects of our own identities, sculpting our personalities with deliberate precision. but strip away all external influences—societal expectations, parental conditioning, cultural dogma—what remains? does anything intrinsic to you still persist, untouched and untainted? or are we merely a sum of borrowed instincts and learned behaviors masquerading as individuality?
the borrowed self
from the moment of birth, we inherit an invisible script. before we can articulate thoughts, before we can even discern right from wrong, we are being shaped. our parents, our teachers, our environment—all of them conspire, consciously or otherwise, to instill in us a set of principles, biases, and limitations that we rarely pause to interrogate.
your accent? acquired.
your convictions? conditioned.
your aspirations? sculpted by expectation.
think about it—do you truly loathe public speaking, or did a childhood humiliation embed itself into your psyche, cementing a fear that has long since outlived its relevance? are you actually introverted, or did early rejection teach you that solitude was safer than seeking connection? do you genuinely hold the beliefs you champion, or are they merely echoes of voices that have long dictated your moral compass?
we accept our personalities as immutable facts, rarely questioning how much of what we claim as ourselves is merely an accumulation of external impositions.
who would you be if nobody told you?
imagine waking up in a world devoid of memory—no past experiences to define you, no societal script to follow, no parental voices whispering instructions in your subconscious. what would remain? what would you gravitate towards? what prejudices would you shed? what impulses would govern you if they weren’t filtered through years of social conditioning?
would you still believe in the same gods? would you still love the same kind of people? would you be more audacious, less restrained, or more indifferent to things you currently hold sacred?
there is something profoundly unsettling about this line of inquiry because it forces us to acknowledge that so much of what we accept as our authentic selves is, in reality, an arbitrary confluence of circumstances. yet, we move through life with an almost comical certainty in the rigidity of our own identities. we declare, “this is just who i am,” as though personality is a sculpted monolith rather than a pliable mosaic of influences.
but if you never chose these influences, if they were imposed upon you by chance and proximity, do they truly belong to you?
the illusion of selfhood
we are voracious collectors of labels. the intelligent one. the reserved one. the cynical one. the ambitious one. these monikers cling to us like second skin, reinforcing patterns of thought and behavior that we rarely question. but how much of these identities are self-determined, and how much of them have we unconsciously accepted because others imposed them upon us?
what if you aren’t inherently “bad with numbers” but were simply dismissed by an uninspired teacher in your youth? what if your so-called “laziness” is not a personality trait but a symptom of disillusionment in a system that offers you no real motivation? what if you were never naturally a “people pleaser” but merely learned, through a lifetime of subtle social reinforcements, that compliance is rewarded with acceptance?
and if all of this—your fears, your affinities, your very personality—is nothing more than a story you were handed, what happens when you decide to rewrite it?
choosing who to be
perhaps the self is not a discovery but a construction. perhaps authenticity isn’t about peeling back the layers to find some hidden, truest version of yourself but about the conscious curation of traits, discarding what no longer serves you and deliberately crafting what does.
because at the end of the day, you are not a finished masterpiece, but an evolving draft—revisable, reconfigurable, and entirely in your hands.
so i’ll ask again—who are you, really? and more importantly, who do you choose to be?
i wish you a great month.